CHAMPIONSHIP GAMES COME and go, but one Super Bowl matchup remains the same: yummy, unhealthy fried snacks versus healthy, unyummy vegetables.

Perhaps that will change. Food engineers at Chile’s Pontificia Universidad Catolica  say they’ve developed a new way to use vacuum fryers to make lower fat, more nutritious snacks, without sacrificing taste.

“People want healthier food, but it is really difficult to change habits,” said civil engineer Pedro Bouchon, co-author of the paper published Jan. 19 in the Journal of Food Science. Bouchon says his technique for vacuum-frying carrot and potato chips absorbs 50 percent less oil than traditional methods. For fried apples, he can reduce oil by 25 percent.

Food becomes fried – that is, brown, crunchy and delicious – when put in oil so hot that water inside the food evaporates. The hotter the oil, the more is absorbed. Putting the process in a vacuum lowers water’s evaporation point. Food can fry at lower temperatures, absorbing less oil.

Vacuum frying is popular in Asia for fruit and seaweed snacks, but isn’t yet popular in the United States. Different techniques are needed for different fruits and vegetables, so Asian techniques aren’t directly applicable to U.S. tastes.

Bouchon’s study is among the first to search for vacuum frying’s sweet spot in western snack foods.

He fried carrots, potato chips and apples at different combinations of pressure and temperature, searching for the range that minimized fat, maximized flavor and kept nutrients intact.

Bouchon’s fried potatoes and apples keep 95 percent of their vitamin C, compared to 50 percent retained by conventional frying. His fried carrots and potatoes absorbed about 50 percent less oil than atmospheric-fried chips, his apples about 25 percent less. Vacuum frying also reduces the amount of acrylamide in a potato chip, a suspected carcinogen found in starchy fried food.